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NFL Picks

NFL Picks: Betting Trends for Early Season NFL Action

Let's look into the early season betting trends and how we might take advantage of what we have learned from past season for our upcoming NFL picks.

Isaac Newton would have made a killing
betting on the NFL. Besides literally writing the book on math (Principia Mathematica) and outworking
all his peers (he may have had Asperger syndrome), Newton defined the concept
of inertia in his First Law of Motion. It goes roughly like this: Objects in
motion tend to stay in motion, while objects at rest tend to stay at rest.

For football betting purposes, the
“objects” in this case are the people that make up the NFL betting public. They
tend to do the same things at the start of every season that they were doing
the year before. Meanwhile, the teams they’re betting on have changed – new
coaches, new players, new systems.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Differences

Even when the players are the same, they’re
not. They’re a year older, which can be a good or a bad thing (often both), and
they might have different motivations behind their performances. Is this a
contract year? Is their team on the cusp of greatness? Or has the player in
question just signed a nine-figure deal after winning the Super Bowl?

Sharp handicappers are always asking these
questions and working to get the answers. The more casual fans who bet on the
NFL are not as good at this. They stick to their old ways until confronted with
their new reality. The result: market inefficiency, the kind you could drive a
truck through during the early regular season.

Mike
D with the Master Plan

Since we’re working the academic theme
today, let’s look at a 2012 thesis presented by Ohio University student Michael
D. DiFilippo. Crunching the numbers from nearly 2,000 regular-season games
between 2004 and 2011, DiFilippo and his colleagues found that the Week 1 NFL odds lines in games between playoff teams and non-playoff teams were off by
an average of 4.28 points. In these games, the playoff team covered the spread
only 34 percent of the time, going 18-35-1 ATS.

Let those numbers sink in for a moment. Now
here’s another: 25.6 percent ROI. That’s the return you would have gotten by
blindly betting on non-playoff teams versus playoff teams in Week 1 from
2004-2011. But did this strategy hold up in 2012?

Dallas (+3.5) 24, N.Y. Giants 17 - WIN

New England 34, Tennessee (+4.5) 13 - LOSS

Atlanta 40, Kansas City (+1) 24 - LOSS

Washington (+8) 40, New Orleans 32 - WIN

St. Louis (+9) 23, Detroit 27 - WIN

Miami (+13) 10, Houston 30 - LOSS

Cincinnati (+7) 13, Baltimore 44 - LOSS

Well, if my math is right (I’m no Isaac
Newton), that’s 3-4 ATS. However, seven games is a small sample size, and I
don’t see anything here that would make me not want to give this strategy some
serious thought in 2013.

We’re
Maybe Gonna Score

DiFilippo and his cohorts also discovered
that the Week 1 NFL lines were far too generous when it came to setting the
totals. The hypothesis is that NFL offenses need time to work out the bugs and
operate efficiently, leading to overly optimistic totals and a money-making
opportunity for UNDER bettors. Sure enough, the UNDER was 102-69-3 in Week 1
from 2000 to 2010, good for a 13.6 percent ROI.

This looks like a healthy early-season trend,
but the NFL has been getting rather offense-centric in recent years. The UNDER
was just 4-12 to start 2011 and 7-9 in the first week of 2012. This could be a
sample-size issue, as well, but betting on the NFL is always like that. The
important thing to remember is that no one trend exists in a vacuum; the larger
league-wide trend toward offense has to be taken into account as well.

These Week 1 inefficiencies also melt away
pretty quickly once the NFL betting public has its new information. Betting the
UNDER in Week 2 might still be profitable (88-79 from 2000-2010), although that
12-18 record from 2011-12 looks pretty scary. The totals level off from there,
and there’s no historical advantage for picking non-playoff teams against
playoff teams from Week 2 onward. As Newton used to say, get ‘em while they’re
hot.